Soccer quotes: Below are a number of famous soccer quotes from some of the best soccer players to ever play the game. If you know of a quote that you don’t see here please email it to us. Hopefully some of the soccer quotes below will inspire you to be the best soccer player you can be and reach all of your goals. If there are any soccer quotes we are missing that you think we should add please let us know.
Image and quote at the top from Neymar via YouTube.
Here are some of the best soccer quotes from some of the world’s best players past and present.
Johan Cruyff: So I see touching the ball once as the highest form of technique. But to be able to touch the ball perfectly once, you need to have touched it a hundred thousand times in training, and that’s what we spent out time doing.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic: I have my confidence and I believe in myself. People call it arrogant, I call it confidence. Ignorant people call it arrogant, intelligent people call it confidence.
Wayne Rooney: Don’t be afraid. There are moments in every game which matter. If you make them, no one remembers mistakes.
Jill Ellis: You can have all the tactics in the world, but that essence of self-belief, that’s critical.
Marta: It’s wanting more. It’s training more. It’s taking care of yourself more. It’s being ready to play 90 plus 30 minutes.
Christen Press: I think as a forward, you believe that the ball is going to find you on your run every time.
Johan Cruyff: In my teams, the goalie is the first attacker, and the striker is the first defender.
Michel Platini: What Zidane can do with a football, Maradona could do with an orange.
Johan Cruyff: I let all youth teams play the same way, like the first team. I always put the emphasis on learning. Sometimes I had the suspicion the youth coaches were more concerned with winning. They cared more about their own reputation. I cared only about the interest of the club. When a player with talent couldn’t defend I put him in defense so he could learn, but that could cost a point. But I didn’t care, I was busy developing the player.
Eusebio: When things don’t go well, some coaches might say: run more. Johan Cruyff said: stop for a bit, don’t run, analyze and it’ll go better.
Pep Guardiola: Everything starts with the ball and finish with the ball. Sometimes we forget that this is a game with 11 v 11, WITH ONE BALL, and we try to keep this ball, we try to play with the ball, we try to make everything with the ball.
Andrea Pirlo: Football is played with the head. Your feet are just the tools.
Thierry Henry: Average soccer players complicate the game, great players simplify it.
Xavi: There is always someone free. Always. You know why? Because there is always the solution to give the ball to the goalkeeper. When the match begins, we are eleven against eleven, but when you have the ball, there are ten of you that want to take it, not eleven. There is always a free man.
Lionel Messi: There is no need to run all the time. I know what to do and I wait for my moment.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic: Messi does not need his right foot. He only uses the left and he’s still the best in the world. Imagine if he also used his right foot, then we would have a serious problem.
Pep Guardiola: The timing needed to go past someone, that instant in which you catch out your opponent, when you go past him and a new scenario opens up before you…dribbling is, at heart, a trick, a con. It’s not speed. It’s not physique. It’s an art.
Alex Ferguson: It just comes down to who wins the most 1 on 1’s. That will determine who wins the match.
Pele: Great genetics are not necessarily a precursor for success in the game. Brazilian Legend Pelé has often said that soccer stars are not born. Without proper soccer training a player will never reach his full potential. It is true that great speed would benefit someone who plays as a winger but would not be as useful for a goalkeeper. The greatest advantage of soccer is that it is not as discriminating as basketball or volleyball. There are no limitations when it comes to physique and it all comes down to individual soccer skills.
Considerable research on successful soccer players and their developmental history, affirms that a good percentage of them have spent time in isolation, working on soccer skills.
How much soccer training is it needed to become a top player? It depends on the efficiency of your training routine. Setting long and short-term goals is a must. When planning out a soccer training regime, one must strive for realistic and consistent program that will diminish specific weaknesses. Broad versatility of soccer skills is the Nirvana of every dedicated trainee.
Pele: Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pele. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man.
Mia Hamm: You can’t just beat a team, you have to leave a lasting impression in their minds so they never want to see you again.
Jermaine Jones: I go into games saying they don’t know me before, I want them to know me after the game.
Mia Hamm: Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.
George Graham: The goalkeeper is the jewel in the crown and getting at him should be almost impossible. It’s the biggest sin in football to make him do any work.
Anson Dorance: The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when nobody else is watching.
Lionel Messi: We are at a good level. Our secret is that we play the same way against each opponent.
Eric Cantona: Whatever happens, there are always things you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have scored a third. That’s perfectionism. That’s what makes you progress in life.
Eric Cantona: An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity.
Roy Keane: United could soon overtake Arsenal as the chief threat to Chelsea, and defiant Keane vowed: We will keep fighting to the end. We are Manchester United, that is what we do.
Manfred Schellscheidt: I don’t believe skill was, or ever will be, the result of coaches. It is a result of a love affair between the child and the ball.
David Beckham: You will go through tough times, it’s about getting through them.
Arsene Wenger: At a young age winning is not the most important thing. The important thing is to develop creative and skilled players with good confidence.
Arsene Wenger: I believe in work, in connections between the players, I think what makes football great is that it is a team sport. You can win in different ways, by being more of a team, or by having better individual players. It is the team ethic that interests me, always.
Phil Woosnam: The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn’t move, kick it until it does.
Eto’o: The most important thing for a forward is speed of thought. Top players read the game.
Stanley Rous: If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game…. In a world haunted by the hydrogen and napalm bomb, the football field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested.
Anthony Burgess: Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God’s. The sixth day is for football.
Stafford Heginbotham: Football is the opera of the people.
Sir Alex Ferguson on Filippo Inzaghi: That lad must have been born offside.
Gattuso on playing for Italy after being injured: I am very close to these colours. I will make war against anyone who tries to stop me from playing in the national team.
Luis Suarez: In Latin America the border between soccer and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team.
Kyle Rote, Jr.: If you’re attacking, you don’t get as tired as when you’re chasing.
Ondino Viera: Other countries have their history. Uruguay has its football.
Paul Gardner: To the aesthete it is an art form, an athletic ballet. To the spiritually inclined it is a religion.
Sandy Strang: The Glaswegian definition of an atheist: a bloke who goes to a Rangers-Celtic match to watch the football.
George Graham: The goalkeeper is the jewel in the crown and getting at him should be almost impossible. It’s the biggest sin in football to make him do any work.
Elbert Hubbard: The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
Bill Shankly: Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.
George Best: I used to go missing a lot…Miss Canada, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World.
George Best: I’d give all the champagne I’ve ever drunk to be playing alongside him in a big European match at Old Trafford.
George Best: I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.
Johan Cruyff: Football is simple but the hardest thing to do is play simple football.
Eric Cantona: The ball is like a woman, she loves to be caressed.
Pele: I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘born’ soccer player. Perhaps you are born with certain skills and talents, but quite frankly it seems impossible to me that one is actually born to be an ace soccer player.
Pele: Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.
Roy Keane: Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
Bill Shankly: Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.
Bob Paisley: If you’re in the penalty area and don’t know what to do with the ball, put it in the net and we’ll discuss the options later.
Dennis Bergkamp: Behind every kick of the ball there has to be a thought.
Bill Shankly: If a player is not interfering with play or seeking to gain an advantage, then he should be.
Bill Shankly: It’s a 90 minute game for sure. In fact I used to train for a 190 minute game so that when the whistle blew at the end of the match I could have played another 90 minutes.
Stan Smith: Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.
Eric Cantona: I am very mistrustful of people who are constantly over intellectualising things. It kills passion. You have to allow yourself to lose control from time to time.
Bobby Charlton: Some people tell me that we professional players are soccer slaves. Well, if this is slavery, give me a life sentence.
Helenio Herrera: The first task is to get to know the players really well-watching them as individuals in training and in match play-to see what is good in their natural game. Then, and only then, can we begin to outline the general tactics.
Bill Shankley: If you are first you are first. If you are second, you are nothing.
Pele: Everything is practice.
Mia Hamm: The person that said winning isn’t everything, never won anything.
Tommy Docherty: Players taught to watch the man with the ball leaves them totally unprepared for the next move, which is always dictated by a player without the ball.
Hugo Sanchez: Whoever invented football should be worshipped as a God.
Ronaldinho: I have the chance to do for a living what I like the most in life, and that’s playing football. I can make people happy and enjoy myself at the same time.
Landon Donovan: Most of us are in this more than just for playing soccer. We’re in it for the bigger goal; to move it along for the next generation.
Marcelo Balboa: I was always taught as a kid if you do something, do it right. If not, go do something else. For me, soccer was life.
Dalai Lama: No matter what activity or practice we are pursuing, there isn’t anything that isn’t made easier through constant familiarity and training (I think you can apply this to soccer as well)
Anson Dorrance: The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when no one else is watching.
George Graham: The goalkeeper is the jewel in the crown and getting at him should be almost impossible. It’s the biggest sin in football to make him do any work.
